Author: Christie Williams

Judith McKay, J.D.

Judith McKay, J.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., faculty in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies (DCRS) in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS) gave a presentation with alumna Michelle Finneran, Ph.D., at the 2020 Association for Conflict Resolution Annual Conference held in the fall. The conference was held virtually, and the theme was “Conflict & Justice in an Era of Polarization.” Their presentation was entitled, “Intimate Partner Violence and the Impact on Conflict Resolution Practice.”

Finneran received her doctoral degree from DCRS and is a therapist in private practice in Coral Springs.

McKay is the Director of the Ph.D. program and faculty advisor to the Social Justice Roundtable and works with students in the community through Community Resolution Services, a practicum and volunteer site for DCRS. CRS hosts Story Café, We Love our Families series, The Women’s Roundtable, and is involved in offering workshops, training for the Crisis Intervention Teams, and other events for community groups and organizations. Her scholarly interests include conflict coaching, mediation, strategic community planning, and prevention and intervention in family, neighborhood, and organizational violence.  For more information about CRS events and how we can partner with your group, free to contact McKay at mckayj@nova.edu.

Extinct dire wolves split off from other wolves nearly six million years ago and were only a distant relative of today’s wolves, according to new research published in Nature (January, 2021). Dire wolves, made famous in the TV show Game of Thrones, were common across North America until around 13,000 years ago, after which they went extinct.

The study shows that dire wolves were so different from other canine species like coyotes and grey wolves that they were not able to breed with each other. Previous analyses, based on morphology alone, had led scientists to believe that dire wolves were closely related to grey wolves.

Halmos College biology faculty member Andrew Ozga, Ph.D. was one of the 49 researchers across nine countries who analyzed the genomes of dire wolves alongside those of many different wolf-like canid species. Their analyses suggest that unlike many canid species who apparently migrated repeatedly between North America and Eurasia over time, dire wolves evolved solely in North America for millions of years.

Although dire wolves overlapped with coyotes and grey wolves in North America for at least 10,000 years before their extinction, they found no evidence that they interbred with these species. The researchers suggest that their deep evolutionary differences meant that they were likely ill equipped to adapt to changing conditions at the end of the ice age.

The dire wolf is one of the most famous prehistoric carnivores from Pleistocene America which became extinct around 13,000 years ago. Known scientifically as Canis dirus, meaning ’fearsome dog’, they preyed on large mammals like bison. The team suggests the dire wolves’ stark evolutionary divergence from grey wolves places them in an entirely different genus – Aenocyon dirus (‘terrible wolf’)- as first proposed by paleontologist John Campbell Merriam over 100 years ago.